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I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Infantry Magazine, Military Review, Naval Institute Proceedings, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles. See "Published Works" on the web version for citations.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
Another archived site is here.
It replaces the ".com" with ".ws".
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Wednesday, November 04, 2015

Another Carrier Debate?

As we find ourselves short of forward-deployed carriers (even if for a good reason), we should have a carrier debate. Heck, let's have a seapower debate.

Calling the U.S. aircraft carrier the "backbone" of America's global military presence, the Navy's top brass highlighted the risks of failing to maintain a big enough fleet during testimony before the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday.

But a new report on the future of aircraft carriers suggests that the Navy's problems run deeper than the number of ships or planes on these mobile airfields.

I know nothing about the author of the report, although I normally think little of the Center for No American Security that put it out. But these ships are so central to our fleet and so expensive that we should debate their role and prominence.

First off, we need to have rules on the debate so those on both sides don't argue past each other using their favorable side of the debate. Remember, carriers have two main roles, power projection and sea control:

Power projection is what we've done with our carriers since world War II. Sail them off the coast of some country that doesn't possess a potent navy or air force, and use it as a floating air base. Without the need to fight for control of the sea, we exercise that control of the sea from the start of a conflict. We've done this a lot. And the carriers have performed superbly.

This history of power projection is what the defenders of carriers point to.

But what the anti-carrier side points to is usually the sea control mission. In this mission, by definition we face a nation with a navy and air force capable of fighting us for control of the seas--or at least denying us full control.

And for nations without carriers, advances in persistent surveillance and guided missiles give them a potent weapon to use against our big carriers.

Further, while defenders of carriers like to call them sovereign pieces of American real estate that can host our planes, unlike actual real estate, our carriers float and therefore can sink. Or just burn and become mission kills. Really.

We don't like to admit it and rarely practice what we do if a carrier goes down, but they can be sunk. They can be sunk by relatively cheap missiles. They can be sunk by relatively cheap missiles guided by relatively cheap surveillance assets.

We like to think of land warfare as casualty intensive and air and naval warfare as cheap in lives. But lose one carrier battle group in the middle of the ocean and we could lose more sailors in one day than we lost in the entire Iraq War on the ground over years.

So, our big deck carriers are very valuable in the power projection mission (or in peacetime disaster response where the disaster isn't shooting at us).

But we have to be careful using them in a sea control mission. Especially since the range of our carrier aircraft has bizarrely gone down over the decades, meaning we have more problems striking enemy assets that can target our carriers.

The Navy is investigating adding an anti-ship missile to its submarine force — bringing it inline with the majority of the world naval submarines, the director of Naval Reactors said on Wednesday. ...

The U.S. submarine fleet did use the UGM-84A Harpoon anti-ship missile but that Harpoon variant was retired in 1997. The current primary attack submarines is the anti-ship weapon is Mk 48 heavy torpedo and is limited in its range relative to anti-ship missiles developed and deployed with foreign navies.

How did I miss that? As God as my witness, I thought our subs had Harpoon anti-ship missiles all this time. It is possible I knew it but forgot, since I am a member of the US Naval Institute so get their magazine. Surely they mentioned this.

The CNAS report does validly point out that another cost-saving measure was made--losing the range of carrier-based aircraft that World War II experience had taught us had to be long to keep the carriers at a safer distance from threats.

Even though I long suspected--even in the Cold War--that carrier survivability was a major problem, I figured that with anti-ship power spread throughout the fleet we had a good backup to gain control of the seas if our carriers burned.

In one sense I can accept that in an era when sea control was assured because the Soviet navy was rotting away in port and the Chinese navy was a glorified coast guard that saving money by getting rid of redundant anti-ship weapons and aircraft range to focus on power projection made some financial sense.

But here we are with a rapidly growing and technologically advanced Chinese fleet and a more aggressive Russia and our fleet still needs our carriers for the bulk of anti-ship missions?

At least the LCS is being redesigned as a frigate with better anti-ship weapons.

If we are to build carriers, perhaps to justify them we need to think of them as reserve amphibious ships since the Marines are short of amphibious warfare vessels (of course, the amphibious carriers would have a reserve carrier role, too).

And I think that while the carrier has a major role in power projection missions, it must have a supporting role in sea control as networked ships, subs, and planes with long-range anti-ship missiles take out the big threats to our carriers before they can pursue the enemy and finish them off.

I'm just not upset that we have carrier gaps in our forward-deployed naval forces. I'm of the opinion that routine forward deployed ships in range of major enemies should be expendable. Rather than dangle these symbols of our power before an enemy, I'd keep our carriers tethered to home waters to support a surge of carriers for either sea control or power projection in time of war.

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.

Of course, it is quite possible that my failure to use Facebook and Twitter has handicapped me in getting an audience. Or it may be an additional issue. I may be a blogosaur!